Page 92 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
“Barberro and I promised you that if you ever needed anything, all you’d have to do is call.” This faerie’s voice was smooth and soft, like strips of fluttering satin. “Still,” she said, “we were shocked when a seagull dropped a letter fromyouright into my lap. How did you convince a Wild Whisperer to help you fraternize with your supposed enemy?”
Steeler’s shoulders tensed.
“M-Mattheus’s adoptive mother… she’s great with birds, and wanted to help me in whatever way she could because… well, it doesn’t matter. I need you to make me something with your Alchemy magic. A way to hide our immature power.”
The silver-haired faerie narrowed her eyes at him. I didn’t know what the conversion from human to faerie years was, but in the sudden spill of moonlight that highlighted the faintest lines around her eyes as some clouds shifted overhead, she looked like a late-thirty-year-old. Delicate lines of ink spiraled around her neck and up her jaw to the tips of her ears.
“What happened to Mattheus?”
Steeler gave her a few surprised blinks.
“I know grief when I see it,” the faerie said quietly.
Steeler exhaled, nodded, and relayed what had happened to his friend in the quietest of shaking murmurs. “So when we go to the Institute next year,” he finished, “it will happen to all of us when we are Branded. And I cannot…” He swallowed thickly. “I cannot lose another one.”
The faerie stared at him through the dome for several long minutes, and I found myself wanting tochangethe mist. To make her simply drag Steeler back through, return him and his remaining friends to the ships where they could forgo the Esholian Institute entirely.
But she only said in a voice as soft as a falling feather, “The only thing that can suppress power is power. You know that, Coen.”
“Please, Nara.” He gripped his oars in tighter fists. “I don’t care how you do it. Please find a way. Or convince the queen to let the others come back before it’s too late. I can stay here, but let them go.”
The faerie named Nara sighed and stared up the arc of the dome, the tips of her tattooed ears reflecting its milky glow.
“I will do my best. Meet me back here in a week.”
The mist didn’t change, but the tension in the air did.
It was a week later. Nara was holding out a tin canister… which Steeler reached through the dome to take. Nothing but the smallest of winces passed over his face when he did so. Truly just a tingle, then.
“Pills?” he asked, screwing open the lid to survey the small heap of pearl-like capsules inside.
Nara nodded and seemed to hold her breath.
She let it out again in a tone that sounded a lot like admittance.
“I took a microscopic amount of substance from the dome itself. Don’t worry,” she added when Steeler’s eyes flashed open.“There is not enough in each pill to disintegrate anyone, least of all yourselves. But therewillbe enough to subdue any magic if something were to cause a flare-up again. I altered the chemical composition of it so that it will latch onto shapeless power as well as formed power.”
“But…” Steeler’s frown was as deep as my own right now. “When the time comes for our Branding, won’t it subdue the Good Council-given magic, too, then? I don’t think they’d be too happy if we didn’t react during their precious ceremony.”
Enough ire simmered in his voice for me to know that he did more than loathe the Good Council now. He wanted to destroy them. For what they’d done to Mattheus.
Nara closed her eyes for a brief moment.
When she opened them again, a decision seemed to settle over her face.
“I’m going to tell you a little secret they don’t want you to know about, Coen.” She leaned in dangerously close to the milky substance that would kill her on contact. “This dome is… conscious. Or, rather, it stems from aconsciousness.”
Both Steeler and I froze. Both of us seemed to arrive at the same conclusion, judging from the taste of inherent knowledge on my tongue. There was only one consciousness who could control the dome, and she lived within it.
Dyonisia Reeve.
But that meant… that meant the leader of the island was a faerie.
Ofcourseshe was a faerie. I should have known from the beginning.
Dyonisia didn’t have any of the five powers branded on her shoulder because she had a power of her own. The dome itself. And she wasn’t immortal because of some Shape Shifter renewal magic. She was immortal because she wasn’thuman. Her earsandfangswere what Shape Shifter elites probably controlled—hid—with their magic.
The taste of mist on my tongue told me Steeler had known all of these revelations all along.
